When Dalat, in Vietnam's Central Highlands, is viewed from a distance,
it gives a very Central European impression. Many of the larger
buildings are from French colonial days. The lake is a manufactured one; the
hills in the background natural and unspoiled. The gables and eaves of
its alpine houses will never know snow and ice - though from the way
that some rug up for the 15-20 degree temperatures, you might be
expecting blizzards. Its red-and-white scaled-down version of the
Eiffel Tower is unimpressive during the day but pretty once it lights
up. It's hilly around town - more pleasant to walk (and we did a _lot_
of walking) than to cycle. Cycling out of town, where the terrain goes
from hilly to mountainous is recommended only for the energetic. A
cable car runs above a pine-forested slope.
It seemed like a good place to burn four days - really two days since
travel took 8 hours each way - since I possibly arrived in Saigon a
little early for my package. Romi, who had been going to the Mekong
Delta that weekend, unbusied further, and decided to go too.
Dalat is aimed a little more at Vietnamese tourists, who arrive in
busloads, than Western ones, and enjoys a repution for oddness. The
markets are full of what has rightly been described as kitsch. There are swans that one can pedal out on the lake - some hideous metal things, and some less hideous fiberglass ones.
There's
skill in the artwork on display in its shops, but it still has a
fundamentally tacky feel - perhaps because there's no subtlety of
expression. Dalat has several churches but one Buddhist Monk,
sometimes called "the Crazy Monk", who's produced concrete faces and
many thousands of paintings and drawings. I wasn't mad about most of
his work - though the more Chinese it was, the more I liked it - he'd a
couple of good ink landscapes, as well as a proficiency in painting
bamboo. He'd also a copy of Starry Night up, though whether this was
his work or gifted I couldn't say - the art factories in Saigon pump out
facsimilies and travesties of well-known and lesser-known pieces by Van
Gogh, Klimt, Warhol, Monet, Lichtenstein, and others.
The so-called Crazy House was a hotel and art gallery, but appears to
be purely operated as a museum at the moment - work continues on the buildings, and is
scheduled to continue until 2010. It's architecturally odd - with accomodation buildings like tree-trunks, oddly-shaped rooms (each with an individual
design), twisty ramps and stairs, and a concrete giraffe incorporated
into the exterior design. It's admirable for its vision, scale and design, but breathtakingly ugly. Of similar vision, but much nicer, is
the 100 Roofs Cafe, which has fitted out the interior of a townhouse as
a forest cave - rendered concrete, wood, painted flowers and vines.
